There is a very distinct trajectory
that directly follows my witnessing an erroneous appeal to nature.
First, lukewarm vomit sprints to the top my throat, and I'm forced to
quickly imbibe it, lest a very unfortunate mess make itself manifest
upon my unsuspecting, undeserving surroundings. Following this
fortuitous feast, I feel the ineffable urge to siege the nearest
blunt object and marry it to the cranium of the fucking moron that
is responsible for such a blatant affront to common sense. However, I
resist the urge, and typically find solace in a time trial exhibition
to the bottom of the nearest bottle. What happens after that is
usually an irrelevant matter of personal speculation.
The
age of Postmodern Enlightenment. The digital age. The Internet: A
portal to voluminous webs of knowledge that would take lifetimes upon
orders of magnitudes of lifetimes to fully traverse. And this is
still a fucking conversation? Perhaps the offender is surreptitiously
aware of the logical principles that clearly rebuke their deliberate,
seemingly prideful ignorance? Feigning abject stupidity, when in
fact, they're more clever than the lot of us level-headed logicians
in advancing their nefarious, self-serving agendas.
That's
probably it. “It's unnatural, therefore it isn't good.” The
examples of this basic violation of informal logic are as legion as
they are odious, and it's almost always in defense of baseless,
personal hatred and/or bigotry. The paramount issue isn't so much
the violation of elementary logical laws that should have a place in
the head of any worthwhile member of society as much as it's
symptomatic of a much more furtive malady infecting the grounds of
modern discourse.
Many
years ago, in a Western tradition far away, mythology was the
ontological heavyweight (nevermind the fact that the concept of
“ontology” had yet to be linguistically conceptualized, or the concept of a "concept", for that matter *bong hit*). It attempted to account
for the peculiar problem of being (a problem that has not diminished
in its eminence to this day) by reductive, dualistic narratives of
gods and mortals, elemental forces and mortals, or basically anything
that didn't have the property of mortality, and, well, mortals. As
historiography would tell us, it was soon displaced by the more
rigorous, abstract methodology of philosophy. Mythology hadn't died,
it had just taken on a new face. It no longer served as a literal
storybook for the genesis of being; it was a literary tool that
illuminated “constants” of both our being and the being of other
beings around us.
Skip
the Medievals, because fuck those guys. Just read Aristotle's
metaphysical disquisitions, indiscriminately toss Christ into the mix
from time to time, and you've got the essence of that era. With the
Renaissance and Enlightenment, the philosophical fecundity of
mythology is summarily castrated. We're now looking at Biblical
stories from a historical standpoint,
at the grandiloquent myths of the Greeks from a quasi-sociological
angle. Mythology no longer harbors any significant explanatory power
regarding the unassailable question of being; it's nothing more than
an interest of historians of various disciplines. Advance a couple of
hundred years: the age of a possibly infinite universe and quantum
mechanics, and mythology becomes the object of fixation for nerdy
adolescent virgins and the curios of those interested in their
ancestral heritage. Surely in 2014, mythology isn't invoked by any
self-respecting interlocutor concerned with immediate social matters
that affect a multitude of beings?
I'll
be fucked if it isn't. Mythology still makes its presence known in
virtually every public debate that sways the opinion of the majority
on a daily basis. It's just been a little more clever about
disguising itself. And I can't think of a more pervasive
manifestation of mythology's new face than the demonstrably
fallacious appeal to nature.
Before
proceeding, allow me to distance this unquestionably dubious maneuver
from two more philosophically nuanced problems. The first of the two
is Hume's familiar is-ought dilemma. Brought up near the end of his
monumental Treatise of Human Nature,
the “explain it like I'm five” overview is as follows: Many
traditions of ethics (prior to and contemporaneous with Hume) have
adhered to standards of morality that attempt to derive objective
normative truths (the “oughts”) from empirical observations of
the world (the “is”), and the equivalence relation between the
two is, if not wholly incomprehensible, not at all obvious. We're
capable of making incalculable observations of the world around us
and the way things tend to behave, but what exactly entitles us to
make moral statements regarding the way things should be
based on the dynamic way things are?
This
dilemma is one of the most widely discussed passages in all of Modern
philosophy, and its interpretations are manifold in the way they
diverge from one another. That's not important right now.
It's
nigh impossible to mention Hume's is-ought problem without mentioning
Moore's naturalistic fallacy, the crux of which harbors much of the
philosophical baggage packed in his brilliant Principia
Ethica. Again, the kindergarten
version of this problem is simple in its statement and profound in
its complexity. It seems tempting to equate “good” with what is
“naturally pleasing”, but examining this strategy through a
critical lens reveals some glaring deficiencies. For one, it's a
prima facie absurdity
to even entertain the notion that we could systematically catalog
consistent databases of “natural” pleasures. Furthermore, it
seems to be an ontological category error to relegate the
all-encompassing “Good” to the same abstract domain as “things
that a particular being finds pleasurable” (whatever that even
means). For detailed responses to this problem, pick any analytic
philosophy text on ethics published after Principia Ethica;
there's a good chance it's directly or peripherally responding to
Moore.
The
above two conundrums are perplexities that confound the philosopher,
rife with the potential for complementary dissemination among
scholars of differing philosophical orientation; with the coalescence
of them all giving us all a greater understanding of the fundamental
issues the dilemmas raise. After all, what is philosophy if nothing
more than a giant fucking series of disagreements, limp-wristed
verbal sparring and bitch-slapping, topped off by a cathartic
handshake, conceding that we're all better people for having
undergone the whole process?
The
appeal to nature has none of the positive potential qualities of the
above. It makes its bed in the vitriolic dialectic of the fool, of
the hatemonger, of the pudgy, pasty shithead going on some rancorous
diatribe that I could surely tune into right this second if I had
cable. It's a dangerous logical sleight of hand; and given the state
of the average news feed on Facebook or public opinion poll on
virtually anything, most of the fucking people in the world are still
letting it fly right over their heads.
A
textbook exposition for demonstrating why a basic appeal to nature is
senseless is short, sweet, and to the point. Its valid logical
structure is an elementary example of modus ponens,
the most rudimentary rule of inference in propositional logic. I'll
omit any formal details, because those are unimportant (and really
goddamn easy to learn for yourself if you possess the gnostic power
of Google navigation), and simply illustrate the archetypal example
of this faulty reasoning that fits the syntactical form of modus
ponens:
If
a thing behaves in a way that is natural, then it is good.
The
thing behaves in a way that is natural.
Therefore,
the thing is good.
The
logical form of the
argument is perfectly sound. However, the semantic content of the
conditionals is what is problematic, and if you can't fathom why that
is, I can only hope that you're a pre-school student that happens to
be passing by the computer monitor. Sesame Street
is on, for fuck's sake, go back to watching that.
Of
course, that strain of argument is not the one that your average bigot or major news pundit tends to invoke to clumsily
support their swift, indifferent marginalization of entire swaths of
people. Their preferred rhetorical atomic bomb is the freckled twin brother of
modus ponens, modus
tollens. It's almost same thing,
only the consequent is negated in order to demonstrate that the first
premise is antipodal to the second premise:
If
a thing is good, it behaves in a way that is natural.
The
thing does not behave
in a way that is natural.
Therefore,
the thing is not good.
In
short, the two crucial terms that we need to investigate are
“natural” and “good”. Oh shit, the investigation is already
over, because it was doomed from the beginning. Humanity, in its
boundless hubris, has attempted to demarcate itself from that which
surrounds it, and it always results in an embarrassing affirmation of
its inseparability from that which it seeks to divorce itself. I
speak of the attempt to be the outsider looking further outside. Of
relegating that which isn't human (good luck defining that in a
manner that isn't simply taxonomical, by the way) to the domain of
“nature”. And in this arbitrarily constructed domain, we observe
patterns in a panoply of organisms and project some normative
schematic in accordance with our centralized data, to ensure the
harmonious order of our superior, enlightened being.
A
normative project with a divine imperative that is, at best, opaque.
At worst, thoroughly meaningless. I speak of the second crucial term.
The “Good”. Remove one “o” and you've got that dastardly
triune figure that, I'll be damned, happens to boast the three big
“O”s (omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience), some of which may
or may not be inherently paradoxical. There's some great irony in the
self-professed Godless invoking His extra-O sidekick, Good, which is
constantly being thwarted by its pesky super-villain antithesis:
Evil. How do we even go about defining what this Good is, let alone
accessing it, or being sure of its noumenal existence? When you
figure that out, go ahead and make a point of pissing on the grave of
every great philosopher that has ever existed before your lunch break
is over.
Point
is, the terms “natural” and “good” have some seriously dense
historical shit surrounding them, and the way they're used by most is
violently reductive. But that's exactly what we do when we frame
things in a mythological fashion. Reduce a kaleidoscopic existence,
bereft of any simple solutions, to familiar meta-narratives founded
upon heuristic observation of our surroundings. After all, why bother
with extended periods of introspection and critically confronting the
world around you, often to ugly conclusions, when you can fall back
on the cushy narratives Mother used to lull you to sleep with?
Mythology is alive and kicking, and the appeal to nature is one of
its counterproductive incarnations.
I'm
out of booze, and typing is becoming increasingly cumbersome, so I'll
end by imploring you to filter your future thoughts through what I've
outlined above. If something along the lines of “wow, this thing in
my head that I was about to make public is really fucking stupid”
comes up, consider it a personal victory, and change.
